CCRI: ABR: Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI)

This project, called the Cognitive Hardware And Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI), is to continue and expand a cloud of hundreds of affordable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), networked together with a variety of neural network machines to facilitate development of next generation cognitive computing. This cloud will be accessible by 30 researchers assembled from 10 universities via the NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform.

These researchers will investigate a range of problems from image and video recognition, computer vision, contextual robotics to cognitive neurosciences using the cloud to be purpose-built in this project.

Training of neural network with large data-sets is best performed on GPUs. Lack of availability of affordable GPUs and lack of easy access to the new generation of Non-von Neumann (NvN) machines with embedded neural networks impede research in cognitive computing. The purpose-built cloud will be available over the network to address this bottleneck. PIs will study various Deep Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, and Reinforcement Learning Algorithms on this platform.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.